books i read aug-sep 2023
Sep. 8th, 2023 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositewelcome back to my solo book club. spoilers for this time it’s real, six crimson cranes, jade city and strike the zither:
THIS TIME IT’S REAL – ANN LIANG
This is a fake dating story by the author of <if you could see the sun> which I really enjoyed (review <here>), and while I don’t love fake dating as much as I love academic rivals I was still excited going in because I find op’s writing style pleasant and readable and most importantly funny. And it was indeed pretty cute and funny and romantic, but unfortunately just not as good a story as iycsts overall and even more unfortunately exploded all my secondhand embarrassment landmines. The main heroine, eliza, is a socially anxious terminal overthinker who always ends up blurting out extremely inappropriate bordering on rude things. I guess some might find it funny and charming and #relatable, as I presume her love interest caz did… I was personally passing away from mortification. I definitely prefer alice as a protagonist even though I’m sympathetic towards eliza’s feelings of alienation and turtle-retreating-into-shell defensiveness, I just like my heroines to be a bit more gripful. I do recognise that that’s a personal preference thing and not an objectively negative thing though.
like iycsts, ttis is about an unlikely cross-social-class Cinderella esque classic fic trope romance set in a chinese international school ft a girl who invested all her stats into a particular talent and left nothing for social or emotional skills x an effortlessly charming popular wealthy handsome boy who struggles to let people in despite outwards appearances of friendliness. Op obviously has a lot of love for this particular set of tropes and I’m not opposed to them but I think there’s a very specific demographic that would find them extremely appealing. I don’t know how to describe this demographic without coming off as derogatory though fkjgdhkjdfkj like…. this one goes out to the second gen asian immigrant gifted kid burnout clique (/NEUTRAL) (/NOT NECESSARILY NEG) (/I DON’T CLAIM THE SELF PITYING ATTITUDES OF THIS COMMUNITY BUT I CAN’T DENY WE SHARE SOME COMMON HISTORY)
Anyway I didn’t mind eliza’s diaspora angst, it can often feel very tired and trite and the jianbing scene where eliza started getting debilitatingly insecure about her chineseness after one of the cooks made an “are you even still chinese” comment due to her inability to speak mando was a bit heavyhanded and so was the memory of her precocious child self ruminating about the transient nature of home as someone who was constantly moving houses being misunderstood and criticised by ignorant white teacher. But again for someone who is less terminally online and hasn’t seen all the discourse there is to see this would probably be quite powerful and touching so I’m not that mad about it. I also don’t generally mind pop culture references in contemporary fiction but maybe there were too many in this book ngl, it wasn’t helping with the embarrassment. Why bts da bus driver etc.
One thing op does slay at is writing desirable love interests and appealing romances 😊 her love interest type is also my love interest type ie charismatic cool confident rich handsome young man who has been in love with the heroine since the start and teases her a lot to rile her up and also has problems and issues about image control and others’ perception of him. This may be sounding familiar. Anyway I obviously liked caz since I like this archetype and the details about image scandals and sasaengs and rehearsing intimacy, which reminded me (even more) of idols I have loved before. The fake dating itself followed the classic trajectory of x starts developing Real Feelings and is scared y will reject them because why would y ever like them back -> x overcompensates by REALLY acting like this is all fake and they have no Real Feelings -> y believes x doesn’t actually like them and is sad and starts pulling away -> x interprets this as confirmation of y managing to pick up on their Real Feelings and rejecting them even though y actually liked them all along even before they started fake dating. It’s pulled off alright I guess, in a way that’s clear enough to the audience even though eliza remains oblivious, but not so drawn out that it becomes frustrating in a neg way. Again I think this would hit harder for people who actually like fake dating as a trope, which I don’t really. However, it must be said that in general I love a neurotic planning obsessed control freak forced into proximity with a laissez faire trust fund baby who is actually also secretly a control freak in the sense of gatekeeping himself rather than a schedule.
I did really like the parallels between writers and actors that were being drawn though, it’s not something I’d thought about before but it is true that writers and actors both have to sell “authenticity” as their jobs even if it is only the image of authenticity. I think the book could’ve gone even deeper into this idea. Like what does it really mean to be authentic as a writer (or as an actordol)? The book goes for the obvious route of passion and personal experience=good which is like, yeah ok sure, but does it really have to be this way? even the initial fake essay eliza wrote that landed her in all this hot water was still rooted in real experiences and memories, and all she added was the imaginary boyfriend, so there was never any question that proximity to Actual True Things That Happened For Real is more desirable than the opposite—I just feel like a bit of devil’s advocate playing and more boundary blurring between acting and sincerity and the symbiotic relationship between the two could have elevated the themes even further. Although at the same time all the hard hitting persona vs true self vs the two as one meta is already on kpop ao3 so it’s not like I was expecting the kind of thoughtfully incisive scholarship uniquely characteristic of fujos out of this book. I also think reading this book right after orv, which is the story about writing of all time, kind of disadvantaged it because orv already said everything there is to say about what it means to be a writer and also had interesting takes on truthtelling and authenticity in fiction.
lots of pinyin in this book ala cgong’s shanghai romijuli but I thinkkkkk everyone was speaking english defaultly due to international school setting so that didn’t throw me too bad. Also smiled at chanel from iycsts’s twitter cameo defending eliza!! She really is such a girls’ girl I was so happy to see her again :’) Gonna give it a solid 7/10 because I did enjoy the read overall despite my gripes. I think I’ve been more generous in assessing this book because i really enjoyed op’s other book and i don’t get offputtingly pretentious vibes from her writing. I realise this is even more arbitrary than usual but I really think op does a great job of balancing romance with character development in a way that has a lot of heart, and I appreciate that a lot.
fave line:
I’ve observed Caz Song long enough by now to know that he dials up his charms whenever he feels uncomfortable or at risk of being vulnerable. He’d flirt with a teaspoon if the situation called for it.
SIX CRIMSON CRANES – ELIZABETH LIM
A three nickels moment about fairytale/myth retellings by asian authors and this one is probably the best out of them, although it is not a high bar to clear and also it doesn’t mean this was a good book. It was still pretty mid but like slightly weighted towards the positive side so I’ll take it. No orbs in this one!! This is a fantasy historical Japanese take on the wild swans with some shades of Cinderella but I just have nothing to say about it. It certainly was a book that I read. General impressions: liked the fate themes, laughed at the blatant sequel hook ending, laughed at the cartoon villain monologues where they explain all their schemes in extreme detail, laughed at everyone’s personality traits being conveyed via straight up saying them in dialogue or Shiori describing herself in her internal narration, felt that some of the pacing was off especially towards the start, teared up at the reveal that the evil stepmother was not actually evil and only ever trying to protect her stepchildren even at the cost of her own life and even though it meant she had to make them hate her and it was all LOVE in the end, unsure how I feel about the nascent love triangle bc seryu barely existed in the book even though I feel positively about him due to him being a dragon, overall 5/10 I’m not mad I read this but it made me feel nothing and I didn’t really care. I don’t think I’ll bother with the sequel. Beautiful cover art though.
Fave line: All I wanted was for this night to last forever. To find that our strands had been crossed and knotted all along. Ironic, wasn’t it, that I—a girl who always wanted to make her own choices—now wished for nothing more than to surrender to fate?
JADE CITY – FONDA LEE
This is legitimately a well-written and engaging fantasy book with a big focus on politics and an interesting magic system closer to biomechanical enhancement than Fantasy Magic and cool characters who I like (measured responsible leader trying to balance a million competing family interests, his reckless trigger-happy charming younger brother henchman who acts as his hands, their disgraced business major prodigal sister who has returned to the fold after her attempt to escape the rigid power structure of their family legacy via eloping and becoming an international student failed, their prodigy warrior younger adopted cousin thrust into their blood feud despite his identity-related insecurities) and a really ambitious scope that I have total faith it will achieve. but I don’t think I can finish it because it is stressing me out so bad lmfao like the #tension is working a bit too well and I don’t really want to finish and then have to commit to another two huge and stressful books to get some kind of closure, so I have decided I will be dnf’ing at the ~50% mark. It’s a dynastic dramatic tragedy focusing on the most powerful family in the society, basically what I imagine succession is like as someone who has never seen succession. But it is also a gritty dark realism kind of story that balances out the sweet and hopeful moments with many cruel and senseless shaggy dog moments because life is not always fair and terrible things happen to people who may or may not deserve them. Except this really depresses me to read ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ I definitely rec it if you like this type of modernised asoiaf-esque tone as I have been enjoying it when I’m not dying from the stress… I on the other hand will go back to my brainsmoothening heartfluttering romances…
STRIKE THE ZITHER – JOAN HE
When noura posted about ya r63 romance of the three kingdoms obviously I was like I WILL BE THERE NO MATTER WHAT but I was actually soooo pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this!! It contained sooo many weirdly specific tropes and relationship dynamics that I love. I have not been having the best experiences with asian ya retellings of classic stories LOL but I thought the execution of this book was really well done and delivered on the premise, and the characters’ actions even lined up with their narrative descriptions which seems like a low bar but almost everything I’ve read this year has been struggling to clear it. I love a ruthless machiavellian girlboss protag (girl zhuge liang) who is actually ruthless and machiavellian and a girlboss and doesn’t just keep saying she is.
I enjoyed the plot pivot narrative choice to have the first act conclude with zephyr literally dying and then regaining her memories and true existence as a goddess but loving the mortal world too much to let go so she possesses her fellow henchwoman’s corpse so she can keep henching and scheming for her leader—I knew something supernatural was afoot and did vaguely expect that the mysterious new god would turn out to be zephyr rather than xin ren or miasma but I didn’t think zephyr would have to die and steal another major character’s body. It was a good and funny move to force her into the body of a brute force stupid jock warrior type who swings axe first asks questions later, for the polar opposite jokes contrast with zephyr’s delicate mastermind scholar character and to give zephyr more difficulties in having to execute her strategist role somehow while stuck in a brawler role.
I really liked the 3-way struggle between zephyr’s calculating tactician brain and her goddess duty to not interfere in mortal fates and her heart more loyal to her mortal loves than she ever consciously realised. Like every time zephyr’s internal monologue was going on about how she was devoting herself to being xin ren’s right hand because it was the best path to her own personal ambitions I was like lmaoooo who do you think you’re kidding girl you have a textbook case of henchpillification and liegesexuality. Like she does legitimately believe that she’s in it for her own interests and that is no doubt also true but it’s also clear that she is fully emotionally invested in xin ren, it’s a very classic idealist leader and cynical second type of dynamic – heart and head respectively (and three other henchwomen share the role of xin ren’s hands), and zephyr tries SO hard to operate within the bounds of xin ren’s sense of honour.
Also enjoyed the complicated rship with estranged sister who has become strategist to a rival warlord and seemingly hates her for no reason but it turns out that it’s because November realised that zephyr was not actually her sister but something else puppeteering the body of her sister. Even though zephyr didn’t know and only loved and wanted to protect who she believed was her little sister [face holding back tears emoji]. I expect this will play a bigger role in the sequel since that plot thread was sort of left hanging and payoff-less, but it was set up well in this book I think.
For some reason I thought this wasn’t a romance story so I was like OPRAHHHHH.GIF when the pretend allyrival but actual enemyrival strategist4strategist mind games I Know You Know I Know two sides of the same coin I See Through You chessmaster het started to kick in. I will always go crazy over antagonistically flirtatious banter idc!! The way zephyr could not help being provoked by crow and provoking him in return… I was smiling and twirling my hair and kicking my feet it was so goodddd. Loved that crow was mildly poisoning zephyr through their diplomatic trip to the southlands in order to keep her physically weak enough to control and she couldn’t do anything about it even though she knew he was doing it and he knew she knew… loved that crow took an arrow for and almost died to save zephyr… loved that crow went into enemy territory to pay his respects at zephyr’s grave even though he had ulterior recon motives which zephyr also knew he was pursuing but it didn’t diminish that he was also there for her… loved their Perfect Understanding newtype flash via competitive zither duet moments AGHHHH if you know how I feel about nonverbal communication. Frail Victorian twink literally dying of consumption x corpse-possessing gaslight gatekeep girlboss can be real true hatelove even beyond the grave!!
Obsessed with the romcomish moment where zephyr in lotus’s body tells him that zephyr had feelings for him just to see how he reacts and whether he reciprocated... After all it’s quick free and easy since zephyr is “dead” and a confession means nothing and can’t expose her vulnerabilities anymore. she just wanted to know if the boy she liked also liked her back and she was so real for that! That’s the bittersweetly heartfluttering ya romance I was looking for :’) There’s also a fraught dream memory scene about the time crow shielded zephyr from arrows with his own body and in the dream he tells her this was the moment he realised the two of them couldn’t coexist in this world. THE LEMONS I BIT.
The reveal that crow was also a double agent and in fact cicada’s loyal childhood friend henchman and they’d planned to backstab miasma and kill zephyr all along but crow risked everything to ask cicada if zephyr couldn’t be spared actually froze me like oh… he really did care for her. Their feelings for each other may only be another string in the millions of strings they’re both cats cradling and not even the most important string but they are still very present and u knowwww I love it when love is not enough and when people prioritise other things like duty or ambition over romantic love.
Finally I thought the actual prose was nice – good balance of classic fantasy style descriptiveness but without being pretentiously flowery, and there was a great rhythm to the narration. Pacing was solid, nothing felt like it dragged or overstayed its welcome and at the same time I got a clear sense of everyone’s personalities and I think the major relationships were appropriately developed, although I would have liked to see a bit more of xin ren and zephyr together, since zephyr’s objectives are so hyperfocused on xin ren’s victory but they don't actually interact onscreen very much. However I’m willing to believe that zephyr’s distancing/pedestaling of xin ren was done intentionally to enhance the liege-vassal power dynamic effect and i liked retrospectively piecing together how xin ren felt about zephyr from watching her grieve zephyr through zephyr-as-lotus's eyes, so I’m okay with what we got.
Overall I was so so so happy to read a book that centres women’s relationships with each other in so many shades of difficulty and antipathy and loyalty and shifting alliances and ambiguity and LOVE. Personally I appreciate so much that it didn’t come with like commentary on struggling against patriarchal Confucian values, this story just takes place in an alternate universe where sexism doesn’t exist and there’s nothing remarkable about these women having most of the positions of leadership in every arena of life. I know it’s not for everyone, but that’s my preferred approach in fantasy historical stories and i feel like i rarely ever get to see it. and it was just genuinely such a breath of fresh air that the het romance didn’t subsume the entirety of the story or zephyr’s personality but was only another facet of a grander Rubik’s cube of cast dynamics. And of course I loved the fate theme that started creeping in towards the end and I hope the sequel goes more into it. 10/10 eagerly awaiting the sequel hoping and praying this isn’t an inheritance games 2.0 situation.
Fave lines:
Ren helps me to my feet. “It’s good to see you, Qilin.”
No words come. My heart last beat this fast for Crow. But Crow scatters me. Around him I am mist, taking whichever form I please.
Ren has the opposite effect. I pull myself together for her, thoughts condensing as the strategist in me resumes control.
I know who it is from the music alone. He’ll note that I’m up at this hour. He might even deduce my troubled thoughts and report me to Miasma.
Leave, before he senses your shortcomings.
But his music holds me still. Crow may not trust me, but he also doesn’t misunderstand me. We haven’t spoken since that first day on the deck, and it doesn’t matter.
We speak now.
THIS TIME IT’S REAL – ANN LIANG
This is a fake dating story by the author of <if you could see the sun> which I really enjoyed (review <here>), and while I don’t love fake dating as much as I love academic rivals I was still excited going in because I find op’s writing style pleasant and readable and most importantly funny. And it was indeed pretty cute and funny and romantic, but unfortunately just not as good a story as iycsts overall and even more unfortunately exploded all my secondhand embarrassment landmines. The main heroine, eliza, is a socially anxious terminal overthinker who always ends up blurting out extremely inappropriate bordering on rude things. I guess some might find it funny and charming and #relatable, as I presume her love interest caz did… I was personally passing away from mortification. I definitely prefer alice as a protagonist even though I’m sympathetic towards eliza’s feelings of alienation and turtle-retreating-into-shell defensiveness, I just like my heroines to be a bit more gripful. I do recognise that that’s a personal preference thing and not an objectively negative thing though.
like iycsts, ttis is about an unlikely cross-social-class Cinderella esque classic fic trope romance set in a chinese international school ft a girl who invested all her stats into a particular talent and left nothing for social or emotional skills x an effortlessly charming popular wealthy handsome boy who struggles to let people in despite outwards appearances of friendliness. Op obviously has a lot of love for this particular set of tropes and I’m not opposed to them but I think there’s a very specific demographic that would find them extremely appealing. I don’t know how to describe this demographic without coming off as derogatory though fkjgdhkjdfkj like…. this one goes out to the second gen asian immigrant gifted kid burnout clique (/NEUTRAL) (/NOT NECESSARILY NEG) (/I DON’T CLAIM THE SELF PITYING ATTITUDES OF THIS COMMUNITY BUT I CAN’T DENY WE SHARE SOME COMMON HISTORY)
Anyway I didn’t mind eliza’s diaspora angst, it can often feel very tired and trite and the jianbing scene where eliza started getting debilitatingly insecure about her chineseness after one of the cooks made an “are you even still chinese” comment due to her inability to speak mando was a bit heavyhanded and so was the memory of her precocious child self ruminating about the transient nature of home as someone who was constantly moving houses being misunderstood and criticised by ignorant white teacher. But again for someone who is less terminally online and hasn’t seen all the discourse there is to see this would probably be quite powerful and touching so I’m not that mad about it. I also don’t generally mind pop culture references in contemporary fiction but maybe there were too many in this book ngl, it wasn’t helping with the embarrassment. Why bts da bus driver etc.
One thing op does slay at is writing desirable love interests and appealing romances 😊 her love interest type is also my love interest type ie charismatic cool confident rich handsome young man who has been in love with the heroine since the start and teases her a lot to rile her up and also has problems and issues about image control and others’ perception of him. This may be sounding familiar. Anyway I obviously liked caz since I like this archetype and the details about image scandals and sasaengs and rehearsing intimacy, which reminded me (even more) of idols I have loved before. The fake dating itself followed the classic trajectory of x starts developing Real Feelings and is scared y will reject them because why would y ever like them back -> x overcompensates by REALLY acting like this is all fake and they have no Real Feelings -> y believes x doesn’t actually like them and is sad and starts pulling away -> x interprets this as confirmation of y managing to pick up on their Real Feelings and rejecting them even though y actually liked them all along even before they started fake dating. It’s pulled off alright I guess, in a way that’s clear enough to the audience even though eliza remains oblivious, but not so drawn out that it becomes frustrating in a neg way. Again I think this would hit harder for people who actually like fake dating as a trope, which I don’t really. However, it must be said that in general I love a neurotic planning obsessed control freak forced into proximity with a laissez faire trust fund baby who is actually also secretly a control freak in the sense of gatekeeping himself rather than a schedule.
I did really like the parallels between writers and actors that were being drawn though, it’s not something I’d thought about before but it is true that writers and actors both have to sell “authenticity” as their jobs even if it is only the image of authenticity. I think the book could’ve gone even deeper into this idea. Like what does it really mean to be authentic as a writer (or as an actordol)? The book goes for the obvious route of passion and personal experience=good which is like, yeah ok sure, but does it really have to be this way? even the initial fake essay eliza wrote that landed her in all this hot water was still rooted in real experiences and memories, and all she added was the imaginary boyfriend, so there was never any question that proximity to Actual True Things That Happened For Real is more desirable than the opposite—I just feel like a bit of devil’s advocate playing and more boundary blurring between acting and sincerity and the symbiotic relationship between the two could have elevated the themes even further. Although at the same time all the hard hitting persona vs true self vs the two as one meta is already on kpop ao3 so it’s not like I was expecting the kind of thoughtfully incisive scholarship uniquely characteristic of fujos out of this book. I also think reading this book right after orv, which is the story about writing of all time, kind of disadvantaged it because orv already said everything there is to say about what it means to be a writer and also had interesting takes on truthtelling and authenticity in fiction.
lots of pinyin in this book ala cgong’s shanghai romijuli but I thinkkkkk everyone was speaking english defaultly due to international school setting so that didn’t throw me too bad. Also smiled at chanel from iycsts’s twitter cameo defending eliza!! She really is such a girls’ girl I was so happy to see her again :’) Gonna give it a solid 7/10 because I did enjoy the read overall despite my gripes. I think I’ve been more generous in assessing this book because i really enjoyed op’s other book and i don’t get offputtingly pretentious vibes from her writing. I realise this is even more arbitrary than usual but I really think op does a great job of balancing romance with character development in a way that has a lot of heart, and I appreciate that a lot.
fave line:
I’ve observed Caz Song long enough by now to know that he dials up his charms whenever he feels uncomfortable or at risk of being vulnerable. He’d flirt with a teaspoon if the situation called for it.
- I don’t think I even like this line that much but it’s the only thing I highlighted for reasons that may be obvious.
SIX CRIMSON CRANES – ELIZABETH LIM
A three nickels moment about fairytale/myth retellings by asian authors and this one is probably the best out of them, although it is not a high bar to clear and also it doesn’t mean this was a good book. It was still pretty mid but like slightly weighted towards the positive side so I’ll take it. No orbs in this one!! This is a fantasy historical Japanese take on the wild swans with some shades of Cinderella but I just have nothing to say about it. It certainly was a book that I read. General impressions: liked the fate themes, laughed at the blatant sequel hook ending, laughed at the cartoon villain monologues where they explain all their schemes in extreme detail, laughed at everyone’s personality traits being conveyed via straight up saying them in dialogue or Shiori describing herself in her internal narration, felt that some of the pacing was off especially towards the start, teared up at the reveal that the evil stepmother was not actually evil and only ever trying to protect her stepchildren even at the cost of her own life and even though it meant she had to make them hate her and it was all LOVE in the end, unsure how I feel about the nascent love triangle bc seryu barely existed in the book even though I feel positively about him due to him being a dragon, overall 5/10 I’m not mad I read this but it made me feel nothing and I didn’t really care. I don’t think I’ll bother with the sequel. Beautiful cover art though.
Fave line: All I wanted was for this night to last forever. To find that our strands had been crossed and knotted all along. Ironic, wasn’t it, that I—a girl who always wanted to make her own choices—now wished for nothing more than to surrender to fate?
- Again I don’t think this line is that good but I do love fate
JADE CITY – FONDA LEE
This is legitimately a well-written and engaging fantasy book with a big focus on politics and an interesting magic system closer to biomechanical enhancement than Fantasy Magic and cool characters who I like (measured responsible leader trying to balance a million competing family interests, his reckless trigger-happy charming younger brother henchman who acts as his hands, their disgraced business major prodigal sister who has returned to the fold after her attempt to escape the rigid power structure of their family legacy via eloping and becoming an international student failed, their prodigy warrior younger adopted cousin thrust into their blood feud despite his identity-related insecurities) and a really ambitious scope that I have total faith it will achieve. but I don’t think I can finish it because it is stressing me out so bad lmfao like the #tension is working a bit too well and I don’t really want to finish and then have to commit to another two huge and stressful books to get some kind of closure, so I have decided I will be dnf’ing at the ~50% mark. It’s a dynastic dramatic tragedy focusing on the most powerful family in the society, basically what I imagine succession is like as someone who has never seen succession. But it is also a gritty dark realism kind of story that balances out the sweet and hopeful moments with many cruel and senseless shaggy dog moments because life is not always fair and terrible things happen to people who may or may not deserve them. Except this really depresses me to read ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ I definitely rec it if you like this type of modernised asoiaf-esque tone as I have been enjoying it when I’m not dying from the stress… I on the other hand will go back to my brainsmoothening heartfluttering romances…
STRIKE THE ZITHER – JOAN HE
When noura posted about ya r63 romance of the three kingdoms obviously I was like I WILL BE THERE NO MATTER WHAT but I was actually soooo pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this!! It contained sooo many weirdly specific tropes and relationship dynamics that I love. I have not been having the best experiences with asian ya retellings of classic stories LOL but I thought the execution of this book was really well done and delivered on the premise, and the characters’ actions even lined up with their narrative descriptions which seems like a low bar but almost everything I’ve read this year has been struggling to clear it. I love a ruthless machiavellian girlboss protag (girl zhuge liang) who is actually ruthless and machiavellian and a girlboss and doesn’t just keep saying she is.
I enjoyed the plot pivot narrative choice to have the first act conclude with zephyr literally dying and then regaining her memories and true existence as a goddess but loving the mortal world too much to let go so she possesses her fellow henchwoman’s corpse so she can keep henching and scheming for her leader—I knew something supernatural was afoot and did vaguely expect that the mysterious new god would turn out to be zephyr rather than xin ren or miasma but I didn’t think zephyr would have to die and steal another major character’s body. It was a good and funny move to force her into the body of a brute force stupid jock warrior type who swings axe first asks questions later, for the polar opposite jokes contrast with zephyr’s delicate mastermind scholar character and to give zephyr more difficulties in having to execute her strategist role somehow while stuck in a brawler role.
I really liked the 3-way struggle between zephyr’s calculating tactician brain and her goddess duty to not interfere in mortal fates and her heart more loyal to her mortal loves than she ever consciously realised. Like every time zephyr’s internal monologue was going on about how she was devoting herself to being xin ren’s right hand because it was the best path to her own personal ambitions I was like lmaoooo who do you think you’re kidding girl you have a textbook case of henchpillification and liegesexuality. Like she does legitimately believe that she’s in it for her own interests and that is no doubt also true but it’s also clear that she is fully emotionally invested in xin ren, it’s a very classic idealist leader and cynical second type of dynamic – heart and head respectively (and three other henchwomen share the role of xin ren’s hands), and zephyr tries SO hard to operate within the bounds of xin ren’s sense of honour.
Also enjoyed the complicated rship with estranged sister who has become strategist to a rival warlord and seemingly hates her for no reason but it turns out that it’s because November realised that zephyr was not actually her sister but something else puppeteering the body of her sister. Even though zephyr didn’t know and only loved and wanted to protect who she believed was her little sister [face holding back tears emoji]. I expect this will play a bigger role in the sequel since that plot thread was sort of left hanging and payoff-less, but it was set up well in this book I think.
For some reason I thought this wasn’t a romance story so I was like OPRAHHHHH.GIF when the pretend allyrival but actual enemyrival strategist4strategist mind games I Know You Know I Know two sides of the same coin I See Through You chessmaster het started to kick in. I will always go crazy over antagonistically flirtatious banter idc!! The way zephyr could not help being provoked by crow and provoking him in return… I was smiling and twirling my hair and kicking my feet it was so goodddd. Loved that crow was mildly poisoning zephyr through their diplomatic trip to the southlands in order to keep her physically weak enough to control and she couldn’t do anything about it even though she knew he was doing it and he knew she knew… loved that crow took an arrow for and almost died to save zephyr… loved that crow went into enemy territory to pay his respects at zephyr’s grave even though he had ulterior recon motives which zephyr also knew he was pursuing but it didn’t diminish that he was also there for her… loved their Perfect Understanding newtype flash via competitive zither duet moments AGHHHH if you know how I feel about nonverbal communication. Frail Victorian twink literally dying of consumption x corpse-possessing gaslight gatekeep girlboss can be real true hatelove even beyond the grave!!
Obsessed with the romcomish moment where zephyr in lotus’s body tells him that zephyr had feelings for him just to see how he reacts and whether he reciprocated... After all it’s quick free and easy since zephyr is “dead” and a confession means nothing and can’t expose her vulnerabilities anymore. she just wanted to know if the boy she liked also liked her back and she was so real for that! That’s the bittersweetly heartfluttering ya romance I was looking for :’) There’s also a fraught dream memory scene about the time crow shielded zephyr from arrows with his own body and in the dream he tells her this was the moment he realised the two of them couldn’t coexist in this world. THE LEMONS I BIT.
The reveal that crow was also a double agent and in fact cicada’s loyal childhood friend henchman and they’d planned to backstab miasma and kill zephyr all along but crow risked everything to ask cicada if zephyr couldn’t be spared actually froze me like oh… he really did care for her. Their feelings for each other may only be another string in the millions of strings they’re both cats cradling and not even the most important string but they are still very present and u knowwww I love it when love is not enough and when people prioritise other things like duty or ambition over romantic love.
Finally I thought the actual prose was nice – good balance of classic fantasy style descriptiveness but without being pretentiously flowery, and there was a great rhythm to the narration. Pacing was solid, nothing felt like it dragged or overstayed its welcome and at the same time I got a clear sense of everyone’s personalities and I think the major relationships were appropriately developed, although I would have liked to see a bit more of xin ren and zephyr together, since zephyr’s objectives are so hyperfocused on xin ren’s victory but they don't actually interact onscreen very much. However I’m willing to believe that zephyr’s distancing/pedestaling of xin ren was done intentionally to enhance the liege-vassal power dynamic effect and i liked retrospectively piecing together how xin ren felt about zephyr from watching her grieve zephyr through zephyr-as-lotus's eyes, so I’m okay with what we got.
Overall I was so so so happy to read a book that centres women’s relationships with each other in so many shades of difficulty and antipathy and loyalty and shifting alliances and ambiguity and LOVE. Personally I appreciate so much that it didn’t come with like commentary on struggling against patriarchal Confucian values, this story just takes place in an alternate universe where sexism doesn’t exist and there’s nothing remarkable about these women having most of the positions of leadership in every arena of life. I know it’s not for everyone, but that’s my preferred approach in fantasy historical stories and i feel like i rarely ever get to see it. and it was just genuinely such a breath of fresh air that the het romance didn’t subsume the entirety of the story or zephyr’s personality but was only another facet of a grander Rubik’s cube of cast dynamics. And of course I loved the fate theme that started creeping in towards the end and I hope the sequel goes more into it. 10/10 eagerly awaiting the sequel hoping and praying this isn’t an inheritance games 2.0 situation.
Fave lines:
Ren helps me to my feet. “It’s good to see you, Qilin.”
No words come. My heart last beat this fast for Crow. But Crow scatters me. Around him I am mist, taking whichever form I please.
Ren has the opposite effect. I pull myself together for her, thoughts condensing as the strategist in me resumes control.
- I loveeee a good dichotomy I LOVE DUTY VS LOVE...
I know who it is from the music alone. He’ll note that I’m up at this hour. He might even deduce my troubled thoughts and report me to Miasma.
Leave, before he senses your shortcomings.
But his music holds me still. Crow may not trust me, but he also doesn’t misunderstand me. We haven’t spoken since that first day on the deck, and it doesn’t matter.
We speak now.
